…an initiative dubbed Project Ingeborg is turning the municipality into a book repository of sorts with 70 QR code and NFC chip-equipped stickers. Plastered throughout town, they direct users to web pages where they can download public domain works, largely from Project Gutenberg. Oftentimes, e-books will be located in relevant locations — so you’ll be sure to find Arthur Schnitzler’s The Killer near the police station, for example. *

I was going to complain about the plants (not all carnivores) and the lack of QR codes on some of the work, but then I got to the Nepenthes ?truncata? approx 4 minutes in and I ceased to care. This work serves a lovely counterpoint to the plodding ugly misuse of QR codes that’s bog standard currently. Side opinion – QR codes are wonderful when they are Easter eggs or lagniappe – a little fun extra. They’re OK when they’re a way for some of your audience to bypass typing in a URL. They’re awful when they’re central and thus a roadblock for anyone who can’t scan.

I’m lying on the gum-specked pavement, ignoring the other people reaching into their pockets after smart phones for their own un-trusting reasons. From here I see strange markings. Calling them hieroglyphics is granting them too much signifier, as graphemes clearly look like things, and what these most resemble are splashes of paint. In fact, they are splashes of paint. Orbits of drips, scattered across the pavement like interstellar dust caught in the filaments of micro-gravity embossed into the fabric of space-time. Scribbles of silver paint marker, visibly more steady-handed and intentional than the markings in a toddler’s coloring book, but their meaning no less obscure. Postal Service Priority labels re-purposed into personal branding stickers, marking phone booths, newspaper boxes, and other paleo-infrastructural fixtures in a dense, overlapping network of clots fixed from past decades’ own obsolete life-blood. Scrapings of keys or other metal blades into plexiglass rain barriers; photographs of electron orbits around the molecular statements of anonymous graffiti artists. “Graffiti artist” may not be a controversial term anymore, but applying the phrase to any and every defacement of public space does not necessarily follow. And yet, I’m seeing the larger code again, and the streets are looking better. *

TMI:

You have a dozen lovers names tattooed on your bicep. And every piece of art has its own billboard to alert you of its existence. How many appliances in your house have a digital chime? Can you tell them apart? What do you gain from recognizing the voice of your coffee grinder, your toaster oven, and your iron? What are they telling you that you could not have gleaned from the smell of ground coffee, fresh toast, or a burned shirt? *

And this bit of wonderfulosity:

We are constantly overwhelmed by our internally autonomous odd-dot astrology, picking apart apopheniac patterns that we have constructed between the brick facades, the mirrored windows, the unplanned drips of paint, and the magic marker vector geometry that grows extremophilic over the surface of our perceivable world. I long for the day when you not only need to present your verified address to buy a QR sticker printer as you do a can of spray paint, but proof of age, as when you enter that kind of club. As if any such control would stop technology from seeking out its desires, when technology like this is the most rampant evidence that our cities are departing from a Technological Victorianism to return to a gorgeous, sleazy, semiotic burlesque. Technologies like QR codes are the beat that gets our society’s machines tapping their feet. From the gaping maw of our technological future comes ugly, distorted, beautiful music, singing out loudly from bricked and re-bricked exteriors, from rusting, twisting pipes, from arcing buss fuse boxes, as our constructions slowly devolve back into the calciferous strata from which their concrete was originally mined, and our culture rediscovers what it used to do to have a good time. *

We present QR_STENCILER, a free, fully-automated utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. Additionally, we present QR_HOBO_CODES, a series of one hundred QR stencil designs which, covertly marked in urban spaces, may be used to warn people about danger or clue them into good situations.*

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About Mediated Toynbee

It all started with John Young. Back in April (of 2009 – who knows how long this will last) I saw some photos on his Flickrstream and a blog entry that made me grin and then started me thinking. “Hmm, what about a literal QR Code Toynbee tile? A symbol that encodes a URL – […]more →